Monday, August 7, 2006

This just in ...

While browsing the Web this morning for any interesting news stories I came across the one below and thought to myself "you've got to be kidding!". This world of ours certainly seems to have its priorities all screwed up. Of course I knew that was the case when there was such a big deal made out of the births of Shiloh and Suri. Why is the world so celebrity-obsessed?? Can someone answer me that one?

"Posted on Sun, Aug. 06, 2006, St. Paul Pioneer Press

First child of beautiful people likely to be girl

BY SHELLEY EMLING, Cox News Service

LONDON — When Hollywood's golden couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, had their first child, it was a girl. When Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes had a baby, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin had a baby, they also were girls.

Coincidence? Perhaps not.

Research from the London School of Economics indicates physically attractive couples are 36 percent more likely than unattractive couples to produce a girl as their first child.

The research — led by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology — is based on the study of 3,000 young American adults in 2001 and 2002 who were taking part in an investigation called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. After hours of face-to-face discussions, interviewers ranked the attractiveness of participants using a five-point scale.

Kanazawa then compared the percentage of boys and girls born to the participants who were deemed very attractive with the sex ratio of babies born to everyone else. He discovered that 56 percent of first babies born to very attractive parents were girls, while fewer than half of the babies born to parents in each of the other categories were girls.

Why does this occur? Kanazawa said that the study supports the evolutionary theory that parents tend to produce offspring who benefit from their own attributes.

Parents who have traits likely to be more beneficial to boys — such as large size, strength, and aggression — are more likely to have boys. Parents who have traits likely to be more beneficial to girls — such as physical beauty — are more likely to have girls.

Kanazawa believes men value physical appearance more than women do when seeking a partner, and so beauty, in general, is a better attribute to pass on to girls than to boys.

Previous research by Kanazawa published in 2005 showed parents engaged in professions such as nursing, teaching and counseling — or those with empathetic "female" brains — were more likely to have daughters. Those engaged in more masculine professions such as math, science and engineering were more likely to have sons.

At the time, researchers explained that babies of people with masculine professions might encounter more testosterone in the womb and so would be more likely to be male."